Status: 02/20/2023 3:30 pm
Comedians close to the Kremlin deceived Angela Merkel. They pretended to be former Ukrainian President Poroshenko and called the former Chancellor. They are now exploring sound recording for Russian propaganda.
“Is Petro Poroshenko there?” asked Angela Merkel at the beginning of the conversation. “Yes,” says a voice on the other end of the phone line – in German. “It is me.” But the man the former foreign minister spoke to by phone on Jan. 12 is Alexei Stolyarov. He is part of the Russian comedy duo Wovan and Lexus.
The two are paid by a subsidiary of the Russian state company Gazprom, as Stoljarov, known as Lexus, admitted in an interview with political magazine ARD Kontraste last summer. For years, the pair made “joke calls” mostly to Western politicians. He posed as Kiev Mayor Vitali Klitschko. In addition to Berlin Mayor Franziska Giffey, EU Interior Commissioner Ylva Johansson has fallen for it – similar to Angela Merkel with the wrong former president of Ukraine.
On Monday morning, Wowan and Lexus posted a 10-minute clip of the phone call online. Overall, the conversation lasted about 30 minutes, Stolyarov told Kontraste. The recording was heavily edited, supposedly because of a person translating. Most took place in Ukrainian. Stolyarov was unable or unwilling to publish an unedited version of the conversation.
The conversation made an “unprofessional” impression on Merkel
Upon request, Merkel’s office confirms a phone call with a person posing as Poroshenko. “As the caller did not explain the purpose of his call and the topics asked changed in his speeches, the former foreign minister had the impression of an unprofessional conversation,” said a spokeswoman.
The Ministry of Foreign Affairs was also informed about this. Your language service translated the call. Poroshenko’s alleged office had already contacted them in writing on 12 December. Stolyarov tells Kontraste that he and his partner initially established contact through a former Merkel employee.
When they call, Wowan and Lexus are obviously trying to introduce their targets, to tempt them to make explosive statements. For example, the fake Poroshenko asked Merkel’s opinion on Belarusian dictator Alexander Lukashenko and Polish demands for reparation for the crimes of Nazi Germany. In the end, he even suggested continuing to speak in Russian – supposedly to piss off Putin.
Merkel responds dryly: “No, we certainly won’t.” She responds cautiously, remaining diplomatic. She says she doesn’t want a “second public front” to be built beyond the official channels of each government. “It would be fine with me if this remained a conversation between the two of us and we didn’t do any big press work.”
The content of the conversation with Merkel is unlikely to offer scandal material. Stolyarov himself describes the uncut version as “very boring”. He said he didn’t even try to get controversial statements from Merkel – allegedly because she rarely gives interviews.
German bloggers as experts
Wowan and Lexus are now apparently trying to exploit the call for propaganda purposes. They discussed the result in a kind of talk show, which they published on the Rutube video platform, a Russian copy of YouTube. Involved is Deputy Speaker of the Russian Duma, Boris Chernyshev, of the nationalist Liberal Democratic Party of Russia, considered loyal to Putin.
German bloggers Thomas Röper and Alina Lipp also participated in the discussion, which would evaluate Merkel’s statements. “Here in Moscow, we know both of them as experts on German issues,” Stolyarov told Kontraste. In Germany, on the other hand, Röper and Lipp are best known for spreading Russian disinformation – for example, about alleged bioweapons laboratories in Ukraine, which Putin used to justify his war of aggression in the beginning. Röper and Lipp are said to live in Russia.
Suspicion of justifying a war of aggression
Röper runs the German-language website “Anti-Spiegel”, on which he claims that alleged Russian war crimes in Bucha were a “lie”. Russian soldiers killed hundreds of people in the Ukrainian city in March 2022. In September 2022, Röper supported fake Russian referendums in eastern Ukraine. In the Wowan and Lexus broadcast, he can now vouch for Angela Merkel’s “incompetence”.
Until recently, Lipp was under investigation in Germany on suspicion of justifying a war of aggression. Since then, the public prosecutor’s office in Göttingen has stopped the investigation – but only because the accused is not currently in Germany, according to the public prosecutor’s office. A spokesman told Kontraste: If Lipp were to re-enter the country, the investigation would resume.